The present invention relates to an electronic timepiece, a method of controlling location information retrieval, and a storage medium.
Some conventional electronic timepieces have features for switching among different local times of various areas around the world and then displaying information or performing other processes. In such electronic timepieces, the user can manually specify the current location to display the local time in that current location. Some electronic timepieces also have a world clock feature that allows desired global locations to be specified in addition to the current location and displays the local time in the specified locations.
Moreover, there are also technologies that, in addition to allowing the user to manually set the local time as described above, can also receive transmitted radio waves from positioning satellites to identify the current location and then set and display the local time in that current location. For example, Japanese Patent Application Laid-Open Publication No. H9-297191 describes a method of receiving satellite radio waves at a prescribed interval to perform a positioning process and then, if the obtained current location does not match the location corresponding to the currently set location information, updating the location information and changing the displayed date and time. There are also conventional technologies for receiving transmitted radio waves from positioning satellites to obtain date and time information and then updating the internally kept date and time of the electronic timepiece to maintain accuracy.
However, in electronic timepieces, and particularly in mobile electronic timepieces where light weight and compact size are required, the power consumption and load required to receive satellite radio waves are significantly larger than those required for other operations. Therefore, it is desirable that load-intensive positioning operations with long reception times be performed no more often than is necessary.
Meanwhile, if the period of time from when the user changes locations until the positioning operation is performed is long, the local time may potentially be displayed incorrectly for a long period of time. Therefore, currently the easiest solution is to set the current location on the basis of a manual operation performed by the user upon changing locations.
However, when the user manually sets the local time, the time may sometimes be set incorrectly depending on whether daylight saving time is currently in effect, for example. Meanwhile, even if the positioning operation is triggered manually when changing the local time setting, many users may not have actually arrived at the target destination by the point at which they want to change the time, such as while riding transportation such as airplanes and trains or while waiting in buildings such as airports and terminal stations, and it is also common for users to be in environments where satellite radio waves do not reach or are otherwise difficult to receive. In both cases, it is difficult to confirm whether the correct location has been set.